Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity.

Paul Valéry, 1928

In the age of digital reproduction, art is available to everyone. Art entered offices, supermarkets, kitchens, and gives us the opportunity to not only to see them but also to own them. Gioconda on tea mugs, Van Gogh on bags, Hirst on wallets, Pirosmani on fridge magnets. The multiple reproductions liberate the work of art from history and their authoritarian “aura” (Clement Greenberg). It makes them accessible for everybody and it gives them new content.

The Museum of Masterpieces exhibits the art from Tbilisi kitchens – masterpieces that are protected in people’s private museums. These are the works of art, which, apart from the already recognized value, hold individual memory. A copy in the private museum becomes an original.

Gathering the “masterpieces” is a visual response to the context of works in the Tbilisi History Museum, the theme of the project Living Room III, and a comment on the Caravaggio show currently on view at the Dimitri ShevardnadzeNational Gallery which has presented as series of lightboxes, which are digital reproductions, of Caravaggio’s works as pure art.

text from Artisterium N10, catalog, 2017